"Can any one be so foolish," asked the revered Lactantius, "the Christian Cicero," whom Constantine chose to tutor his son,

OK, stop. Lactantius's views were controversial enough to be condemned as heretical after his death. And yes, the Renaissance humanists called him the Christian Cicero, but this was over a millennium after his death, and it had nothing to do with his views on the shape of the earth (nor did his condemnation for that matter). I don't mean to suggest that he was not held in high esteem by some, but Boorstin is only presenting the positive assessment of him. Leaving out the negative assessment is pretty misleading.

"as to believe that there are men whose feet are higher than their heads, or places where things may be hanging downwards, trees growing backwards, or rain falling upwards? Where is the marvel of the hanging gardens of Babylon if we are to allow of a hanging world at the Antipodes?"

Saint Augustine, Chrysostom, and others of their stature heartily agreed that the Antipodes ("anti"-"podes," a place where men's feet were opposite) could not exist.

Augustine, Chrysostom, and others did not agree that a place where men's feet were opposite could not exist but that men where men's feet were opposite could not exist. "Podes" means feet and a place doesn't have feet -- men do. The references of Augustine and others were not geographical statements about the shape of the earth but anthropological statements about the geographical extent of the human race. One of our earliest references to antipodes, after all, comes from Plato's Timaeusin the fourth century BC, and it explicitly affirms the sphericity of the earth.

Classic theories of the Antipodes described an impassable fiery zone surrounding the equator which separated us from an inhabited region on the other side of the globe.

Yes, exactly right. The issue with antipodes was not whether there was an other side of the earth but whether there could be human beings there. It was thought at the time that the equatorial region was too hot to travel through and the ocean too wide to sail across. As such, if there were "people" on the other side of the earth, they couldn't be the descendants of Adam and Eve because there would have been no way for them to get there from here; and if they weren't descendants of Adam and Eve then they wouldn't be human beings because they would not share a common origin with us. This raised further theological questions as to whether antipodes would be stained by original sin, and if so, whether Christ's atonement would apply to them -- questions that could be avoided if we simply denied the existence of antipodes. However, it should be pointed out that this move was far from universal. Other Christians accepted the possibility of antipodes. It was controversial to affirm their existence, certainly, but not heretical. Note also how similar this is to the question today of whether intelligent extraterrestrials exist; if so whether they are fallen; and if so whether Christ's atonement would apply to them, or whether God will have provided some other form of redemption for them. In both cases, for the antipodes and the aliens, we don't have enough information to answer these questions, so absent further revelation, we can only speculate. I wrote a post to start a series on this issue several years ago but never followed through on it. Now I'm thinking I should reboot it.

So, returning to Daniel Boorstin, at this point I start thinking, aha, at first he sounded like he was going to exaggerate the extent of flat-earthism within Christianity, but he knows that the issue about antipodes was anthropological not geographical, so maybe he's going to get it right.

This raised serious doubts in the Christian mind about the sphericity of the earth.

(Sigh) No, no it didn't Daniel.

The race that lived below that torrid zone of course could not be of the race of Adam,

That's about people, not the shape of the earth.

nor among those redeemed by the dispensation of Christ.

That's about people, not the shape of the earth.

If one believed that Noah's Ark had come to rest on Mt. Ararat north of the equator, then there was no way for living creatures to have an Antipodes.

That's about people, not the shape of the earth.

To avoid heretical possibilities, faithful Christians preferred to believe there could be no Antipodes,

That's about people, not the shape of the earth. Also, as mentioned, affirming the existence of antipodes was controversial but not heretical. I've only ever heard of one guy, Vergilius of Salzburg, receiving any kind of opprobrium for affirming the existence of antipodes. And the issue there was the theological issues mentioned above by myself and Boorstin: if there are inhabitants of the other side of the world, do they share a common origin with us, do they share the stain of original sin with us, and does Christ's atonement apply to them? If the issue raised "heretical possibilities," which it didn't, it would have been in this area, not with regards to the sphericity of the earth

Saint Augustine, too, was explicit and dogmatic, and his immense authority, compounded with that of Isidore, the Venerable Bede, Saint Boniface, and others, warned away rash spirits.

None of these people claimed the earth was flat. Isidore is sometimes included among the flat-earthers, but most historians deny that he was one.

The ancient Greek and Roman geographers had not been troubled by such matters. But no Christian could entertain the possibility that any men were not descended from Adam or could be so cut off by tropical fires that they were unreachable by Christ's Gospel.

Plenty of people did. It was a controversial issue, and controversies don't become controversies if there aren't people on both sides of them. Most people in the early Middle Ages were skeptical about the possibility of antipodes, but some accepted it.

"Yes, verily," declared Romans 10:18, "their sound went forth all over the earth, and their words unto the ends of the whole world." Neither Faith nor Scripture had any place for beings unknown to Adam or to Christ.

OK, I suspect -- I hope -- "unknown to Adam or to Christ" is a way for Boorstin to refer to the theological issues about creatures with distinct origins from us and the extent of Christ's atonement. Because otherwise it makes no sense. Unknown to Christ? See, here's the thing: according to Christianity God is omniscient. That means he knows everything. So if there are antipodes God knows them. And while Christ gave up the exercise of his omniscience (not his omniscience itself), he only did so during his incarnation. Unknown to Adam? I'm not sure what this even means since everyone alive in the first millennium AD would have been unknown to Adam, having been born after he would have died. Maybe Adam is a stand-in for the human race, so Boorstin is saying "Neither Faith nor Scripture had any place for beings unknown to humanity." But if that's what he means, then it's obviously false. They didn't suffer from delusions of grandeur, they didn't think they might be omniscient, they knew perfectly well that there were many places they hadn't been to yet, and they didn't know precisely what was there. So, again, since I can't make sense of "beings unknown to Adam or to Christ," I strongly suspect Boorstin is just using this as shorthand to refer to the theological issues discussed above. But, regardless, it's just not true that "Neither Faith nor Scripture had any place for beings" outside the human race. Wouldn't angels fit into that category? I'm pretty sure Scripture, faith (whatever Boorstin means by that), and theology affirm the existence of angels.

I further suspect (I could easily be wrong) that Boorstin has in the back of his mind what I'm going to call "The Big Fish in a Small Pond Myth." The suggestion here is that people thought the universe was much smaller in ancient times because they thought the earth was the most important place, and so there couldn't be a lot of space or a lot of locations that were irrelevant to human life. But of course this is completely ridiculous, as I wrote here. Long story short: the earth was considered one of the smallest objects in an unfathomably large universe. The only bodies they thought were smaller than the earth were Mercury, Venus, and the Moon: everything else was bigger, even the smallest stars. And while they thought the universe only extended out to Saturn's orbit plus a sphere of stars, they had approximated the distance to Saturn pretty well, and that distance is simply greater than our imaginations can handle. If you don't believe that, check out If the Moon Were Only One Pixel and scroll right to get an idea of the incredible distances involved. Remember, you only have to go out to Saturn, but also remember that the ancients had gauged that distance pretty accurately. For all practical purposes, they thought the earth was a point of zero volume within an infinitely large universe, and they stated this pretty directly.

The bearing of this on the Big Fish in a Small Pond Myth is that the ancients and medievals thought that the vast, vast majority of the cosmos was completely irrelevant to human existence, at least in a spatial sense. So the idea that there were places outside of humanity's influence was common knowledge. I doubt anyone seriously thought otherwise.

"God forbid," wrote a tenth-century interpreter of Boethius, "that anybody think we accept the stories of antipodes, which are in every way contradictory to Christian faith."

Yep, it was controversial. But not heretical. And it didn't imply that the earth was anything other than a sphere.

"Belief in Antipodes" became another stock charge against heretics prepared for burning.

Really? Like who? Who was burned for believing in antipodes? Who was even excommunicated? Vergilius was reproved, and he's the only one I can find who even suffered that.

Some few compromising spirits tried to accept a spherical earth for geographic reasons, while still denying the existence of Antipodean inhabitants for theological reasons. But their number did not multiply.

Dude. Five Christians denied the earth is a sphere. Apart from them, EVERYONE who denied the existence of the antipodes accepted a spherical earth. "Their number did not multiply"? Other than those five, their number includes EVERYONE.

It was a fanatical recent convert, Cosmas of Alexandria, who provided a full-fledged Topographia Christiana, which lasted these many centuries to the dismay and embarrassment of modern Christians.

Well, yeah, Cosmas is embarrassing, but if only wise and intelligent people could become Christians, that would probably constitute a reason to reject Christianity. At any rate, Cosmas wasn't even translated into Latin to make the Topographia available to western Europe until the early 18th century. You know what Greek works were translated before then? All of them. In 1509, Copernicus translated some short writings of Theophylactus Simocatta from Greek into Latin. He had to settle for such an obscure text because all of the good stuff had already been translated, many of them more than once. Theophylactus was the dregs. Cosmas wasn't translated for another two centuries. He had zero influence.

We do not know his real name, but he was called Cosmas on account of the fame of his geographic work,

I don't know why he was called Cosmas, but I know it wasn't for the reason Boorstin states, viz. "the fame of his geographic work." You know how I know that? Because his geographic work achieved no fame. He was unknown in his own time, unknown throughout the rest of the Middle Ages, unknown during the Renaissance, and unknown in the early Modern era. It was only when he was translated in the 18th century that people became aware of him as a curiosity. That translation was itself motivated by the translation of a few excerpts from his book a few decades earlier by some manuscript collectors. He exerted virtually no influence on his contemporaries or the Middle Ages.

and nicknamed Indicopleustes (Indian Traveler), because he was a merchant who traveled around the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, and had traded in Abyssinia and as far east as Ceylon. After his conversion to Christianity about A.D. 548, Cosmas became a monk and retired to a cloister on Mt. Sinai where he wrote his memoirs and his classic defense of the Christian view of the earth.

Oh for *@#%'s sake. "The Christian view of the earth"? Really? If anything, the Christian view of the earth at the time would have been Ptolemy's view of the earth, since that was the science of the day, and the Ptolemaic view unambiguously affirmed the earth to be a sphere.

This massive illustrated treatise in twelve books gives us the earliest surviving maps of Christian origin.

Well if that just means the earliest surviving maps written by a Christian, then I guess that's true. Of course, given Ptolemy's authority, Ptolemy's map would have been the Christian one at that time for the same reason that Ptolemy's cosmology was the Christian one. It was the science of the day.

Cosmas rewarded the faithful with a full measure of vitriol against pagan error and a wonderfully simple diagram of the Christian universe.

"The Christian universe." Right. Not "The universe as advocated by a lone conspiracy-theory-minded crank" but "The Christian universe." And Cosmas wasn't able to reward the faithful with his vitriol and diagrams because nobody read him.

In his very first book he destroyed the abominable heresy of the sphericity of the earth. Then he expounded his own system, supported, of course, from Scripture, then from the Church Fathers, and finally from some non-Christian sources.

Dude, that's what conspiracy theorists do. They pick and choose some information, remove it from its context, ignore all the evidence supporting that context, and then use the little pieces of information to construct a new context. You can find people doing that in support of just about any view. There's people who defend Christianity or atheism in this way, but that doesn't mean you can smear all Christians and atheists as dishonest and/or unintelligent hacks.

What he provided was not so much a theory as a simply, clear, and attractive visual model.

. . . which nobody read.

When the apostle Paul in Hebrews 9:1-3, declared the first Tabernacle of Moses to be the pattern of this whole world, he conveniently provided Cosmas his plan in all necessary detail. Cosmas had no trouble translating Saint Paul's words into physical reality.

Huh. It's curious that no one else took the author of Hebrews the way Cosmas did. It's almost as if Cosmas was going against the established understanding of the text. Also, Paul probably isn't the author of Hebrews, although it was thought that he was until the Modern era. But I think we can assume that by ascribing Hebrews to Paul, Boorstin is probably just giving what Cosmas would have thought about it.

The first Tabernacle "had ordinances of divine service and worldly sanctuary; for there was a Tabernacle made; the first wherein was the candlestick, and the table and shewbread, which is called the Sanctuary." By a "worldly" sanctuary Saint Paul meant "that it was, so to speak, a pattern of the world, wherein was also the candlestick, by this meaning the luminaries of heaven, and the table, that is, the earth, and the shew-bread, by this meaning the fruits which it produces annually." When Scripture said that the table of the Tabernacle should be two cubits long and one cubit wide, it meant that the whole flat earth was twice as long, east to west, as it was wide.

Huh again. It's also curious that no one followed in Cosmas's footsteps in this interpretation of Hebrews. It's almost as if it has no exegetical basis whatsoever.

In Cosmas' appealing plan, the whole earth was a vast rectangular box, most resembling a trunk with a bulging lid, the arch of heaven, above which the Creator surveyed his works. In the north was a great mountain, around which the sun moved, and who obstructions of the sunlight explained the variant lengths of the days and the seasons. The lands of the world were, of course, symmetrical: in the East the Indians, in the South the Ethiops, in the West the Celts, and in the North the Scythians. And from Paradise flowed the four great rivers: the Indus or Ganges into India; the Nile through Ethiopia to Egypt; and the Tigris and the Euphrates that watered Mesopotamia.

And we have people who think the planes that hit the twin towers on 9/11 were holograms, or that the Moon landings were fake, or that the Holocaust didn't happen, or that Jesus never existed. So what? There's always silly people making silly claims. Unless you have a reason to think the silly claims were more widespread than a single writer who exerted no influence on his contemporaries or the Middle Ages, spending so much time on Cosmas is an attempt to mislead people into thinking he is representative when he isn't.

There was, of course, only one "face" of the earth -- that which God gave to us the descendants of Adam -- which made any suggestion of Antipodes both absurd and heretical.

Only. Five. Christians. Affirmed. A. Flat. Earth. Point to someone who was excommunicated for affirming antipodes, Daniel. Point to an official decree declaring belief in antipodes to be heretical. No? You can't? What a surprise. I should give Boorstin some grace here though: maybe he's just speaking in Cosmas's voice. That is, maybe he's just stating what he thinks Cosmas said or would have said.

Cosmas' work is still very much worth consulting as a wholesome tonic for any who believe there may be limits to human credulity.

You know what other work could be similarly consulted Daniel? Yours. Ba dum ksh.

After Cosmas came a legion of Christian geographers each offering his own variant on the Scriptural plan.

And none of whom affirmed a flat earth. Remember that? The actual subject you're writing about? I mean, the title of this chapter is "The Flat Earth Returns" for Pete's sake. It seems kind of significant that now you're talking about people who denied that the earth is flat without mentioning that fact.

There was Orosius, the Spanish priest of the fifth century who wrote a famous encyclopedia, Historiae adversum paganos, where he retailed the familiar threefold division of the world into Asia, Europe, and Africa, embellished by some generalizations of his own:

Which didn't include a flat earth. The following is a quote from Orosius that Boorstin gives.

Much more land remains uncultivated and unexplored in Africa because of the heat of the Sun than in Europe because of the intensity of the cold, for certainly almost all animals and plants adapt themselves more readily and easily to great cold than to great heat. There is an obvious reason why Africa, so far as contour and population are concerned, appears small in every respect (i.e., when compared with Europe and Asia). Owing to her natural location the continent has less space and owing to the bad climate she has more desert land.

This seems pretty tame and utterly irrelevant to the issue of the earth's sphericity.

Then the even more influential Christian encyclopedist Isidore Archbishop of Seville in the seventh century explained that the earth was known as orbis terrarum because of its roundness (orbis) like a wheel.

"Round like a wheel" (quia sicut rota est) is a phrase that Isidore himself uses, so I can't give Boorstin grief for repeating it here. This is one of the passages that make some people count him among the flat-earthers. However, Isidore is only referring to the land mass that includes Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa. Like all maps of the time (apart from Cosmas's perhaps), he's referring to the known world. Since he gives indications elsewhere that the earth is spherical, most historians do not take him to be affirming a flat earth here.

At any rate, this kind of map is more commonly called a T and O map. These maps were certainly round and flat, but the reason they were flat is . . . wait for it . . . they were maps. You might think that's unnecessary to point out, but I have encountered people who argue from the fact that ancient and medieval maps are flat to the conclusion that the people who drew them must have thought the earth was flat. I'm serious.

"It is quite evident," he observed, "that the two parts Europe and Africa occupy half the world and that Asia alone occupies the other half. The former were made into two parts because the Great Sea called the Mediterranean enters from the Ocean between them and cuts them apart." Isidore's "wheel maps" followed the convention of the time by putting east at the top:

Again, Isidore's maps, like all other maps of the time, were meant to show the known world. I've never heard them referred to as "wheel maps," and Boorstin doesn't give a reference for that phrase. However a google search on "Isidore" and "wheel maps" comes up with a few hundred results, so I guess he could be quoting someone. What follows is a quote from Isidore.

Paradise is a place lying in the eastern parts, whose name is translated out of the Greek into Latin as hortus [i.e., garden]. It is called in the Hebrew tongue Eden, which is translated in our language as Deliciae [i.e., place of luxury or delight]. Uniting these two gives us Garden of Delight; for it is planted with every kind of wood and fruit-bearing tree having also the tree of life. There is neither cold nor heat there but a continual spring temperature.

From the middle of the Garden, a spring gushes forth to water the whole grove, and, dividing up, it provides the sources of four rivers. Approach to this place was barred to man after his sin, for now it is hedged about on all sides by a sword-like flame, that is to say it is surrounded by a wall of fire that reaches almost to the sky.

Once again, I don't see how any of this is relevant to the issue of whether the earth is round. Isidore is merely commenting on his understanding of Genesis 2. I'll just note here that, centuries earlier, Origen, one of the early Church Fathers, argued that "no one of understanding" could take the account of the garden of Eden as referring to an actual place (De Principiis 4:1:16).

Christian geographers who lacked facts to fill their landscapes found a rich resource in the ancient fantasies. While they were contemptuous of pagan science, which they considered a menace to Christian faith,

Yeah, that's complete crap. Of course there are exceptions, but in general Christians accepted pagan science. Certainly they assigned a low priority to it, they thought other things were much more important, but they didn't tend to treat it with contempt, much less did they consider it "a menace to Christian faith." Again, this is in general: it varied from person to person. David C. Lindberg, probably the greatest science historian of the last half century, writes, "No institution or cultural force of the patristic period offered more encouragement for the investigation of nature than did the Christian church. Contemporary pagan culture was no more favorable to disinterested speculation about the cosmos than was Christian culture. It follows that the presence of the Christian church enhanced, rather than damaged, the development of natural sciences."

their prejudice did not include pagan myths.

I'm not sure what he's referring to here. The early Christian church (earlier than the period that Boorstin is writing about) was very hostile to pagan myths. Over time the church certainly adopted some pagan practices, like those we now associate with Christmas, but not the accompanying myths. If Boorstin is just thinking of these practices, then I guess you could make that claim, but once again, it's pretty misleading. It sounds like he's referring to the stories in those myths, not just the practices. So it's interesting that Boorstin gets these two points exactly backwards: he says the Christians were hostile to pagan science but not pagan myths, when actually they were hostile to pagan myths but not pagan science.

Once again, I suspect -- and I could be wrong -- that Boorstin is thinking about the claim that there are parallels to Jesus' life in world mythology, and that these may have influenced the development of Christian theology. So there are allegedly virgin births, resurrections, last suppers, baptisms, etc. in all sorts of myths around the world before the advent of Christianity. The problem with this is that it is not true. The myths in question do not parallel Christianity in any serious detail, and this has been the consensus view of New Testament historians for over a century. To see my earlier posts on this, see here, here, here, and here.

These were so numerous, so colorful, and so contradictory that they could serve the most dogmatic Christian purposes.

Oh that's cute. Pagan myths were contradictory and so could be used to serve Christian dogma. Gosh, what does that imply? Certainly not that most of the great logicians in human history were Christians. Certainly not that Christian theologians spent their lives reflecting on doctrines in order to make them logically coherent and consistent with the larger body of knowledge. You know, one of the first things I discovered when I was trying to refute Christianity was that it couldn't be dismissed as foolish. It might be false, but too many people much, much smarter than me thought it made sense. I couldn't bring myself to seriously think my knee-jerk reaction was a surer guide to truth than the lifelong reflections of some of the most intelligent people who have ever lived.

While Christian geographers feared the close calculations of Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy,

Like who? Who feared these close calculations? What did they write that leads you to that conclusion? What about the Christians who built on their calculations?

they cheerfully embellished their pious Jerusalem-centered maps with the wildest ventures of pagan imaginations. Julius Solinus (fl. A.D. 250), surnamed Polyhistor, or "Teller of Varied Tales," provided the standard source of geographic myth during all the years of the Great Interruption, from the fourth till the fourteenth centuries.

Solinus himself was probably not a Christian. Nine-tenths of his Collectanea rerum memorabilium (Gallery of Wonderful Things), first published about A.D. 230-240, came straight out of Pliny's Natural History, though Solinus does not even mention his name. And the rest was foraged from other classical authors. Solinus' peculiar talent, as a recent historian of geography observes, was "to extract the dross and leave the gold." It is doubtful if anyone else over so long a period has ever influenced geography "so profoundly or so mischievously."

OK, now we're not even talking about Christians anymore, let alone flat-earthers. Boorstin's argument is that "Stupid Christians believed the earth was flat because look at this one guy nobody read. And there's another guy who wasn't a Christian who said some stupid stuff about other subjects too." Come on man, focus.

Yet Solinus' dross had wide appeal. Saint Augustine himself drew on Solinus, as did all the other leading Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages.

I hate to think I'm growing cynical, but I'm starting to suspect that Augustine may have just quoted Solinus once or twice, and a handful of other Christian authors may have as well, and those who didn't are excluded from the guild of "leading Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages" on grounds that Boorstin considers too obvious to mention. And we'll just ignore all those non-Christian authors who quoted Solinus as well because that wouldn't serve our purpose.

The stories and fabulous images that Solinus retailed enlivened Christian maps right down to the Age of Discovery. They became an all-encompassing network of fantasy, replacing the forgotten rational gridwork of latitude and longitude, which had been Ptolemy's legacy.

Holy crap, did he just refer to the forgotten legacy of Ptolemy? Admittedly, Ptolemy's legacy was felt more in astronomy than geography: Almagest was more well-known than Geographia, but the latter was still extremely influential. Moreover, Ptolemy's legacy regarding astronomy involved as a core element that the earth is a sphere, and this legacy was all but universal throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages. As Albert Van Helden writes in Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley, "From the second to the sixteenth century, astronomy was a commentary on Ptolemy. No man ever wielded posthumously such a pervasive and long-lived authority in astronomy, and it is to be doubted that anyone ever will again." Since a spherical earth was one of the foundational elements of Ptolemy's astronomy, for Boorstin to use maps to suggest that people thought the earth was flat in the Middle Ages is just intellectually dishonest. You couldn't explore medieval science sufficiently to find out the influence of Ptolemy's geographywithout finding out the influence of his astronomy and the spherical earth upon which it is predicated.

I'll stop here, but man, Boorstin's scholarship is sloppy to say the least. It's almost like The Discoverers was written by an Internet troll. Just in case you need another example, here's a quote from chapter 20, "Ptolemy Revived and Revised": "No amount of theology would persuade a mariner that the rocks his ship foundered on were not real. The outlines of the seacoast, marked off by hard experience, could not be modified or ignored by what was written in Isidore of Seville or even in Saint Augustine." OK, exactly what theological claims would bear on where rocks were located in the sea? And where did Isidore or Augustine write about the coastlines? (Spoiler: they didn't. Boorstin just made it up.) At some point, you have to disregard an author as a crank, and I'm afraid Boorstin reaches that point all too quickly.

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